Anyway, things to consider: Time, how long it will take 1 person to demo, prep, complete and finalize a bathroom gut job.
A level of custom work. Be prepared to understand as each job progresses on any house built 50 years ago, there is a level of custom design, effort, and install that occurs. For instance. I was prepared to gut the ENTIRE bathroom. Floors, tiles, bathtub, sink, even the walls and ceilings. However, in this particular bathroom, it had the traditional and common at the time half wall split( the tiles ended about 4 feet off the ground. This gave me the ability to remove all of the old tiles up to that division point. That left the top half of the walls and the ceiling intacted. I did have to double up the sheet rock on the lower half of the wall in order to make the top and bottom level and smooth to each other. So I simply used a half inch layer and a quarter inch layer of sheetrock. It added a slight bit of sound privacy as well being as this bathroom was off of the kitchen.
The original walls I might point out was NOT sheetrock, it was 1943 era concrete slather walls. The concrete mortar was smoothed over metal mesh that was nailed to the studs. THis made for a very loud and challenging first step. The iron bathtub was quite a feat.
Once the demo was completed the smaller challenges I faced on top of having never tiled in my life was taking each step slowly. One of the toughest steps was dry laying the floor tiles, all of them. It is argous work, tough on the back. Knee pads and copper fit back brace are must have tools from the start in my opinion.
The other challenging and not so much phyical and this has two parts: 1 the base of the new shower needs to be laid on poured concrete and the type you are supposed to use sets quickly. You need to have enough from the start, there are no do overs with this step… stressful thought process but totally doable. I had enough, plenty, but would have liked half a bucket more. The reason is if you do not have the base set in concrete the plastic shower stand will eventually split and you have to replace it which means tear it out and redo… so get it right the first time, no skimping. Adding to that process is the other mortars and grout and the tiling itself. I was very pleased with my outcome. I know I still owe you guys a final picture, I might even have a video…. coming soon…